PTR Community Buff Off: Drop Rates Up

[caption id="attachment_382748" align="alignright" width="250"] Totally legit screenshot.[/caption]The musical chairs status of for the community buff continues on the PTR, and the +2000% legendary find (plus double goblins, 300% exp, etc) was disabled late Monday evening. On the downside, no more mega drops and extra exp/gold. On the bright side, no more 5 hour queues!

The following buff has been disabled and is no longer active on the PTR:

My new S4 char was about Paragon 25 without much gear, so I did some solo T1 rifts and couldn't believe the drop rate. I found 4-8 legs in every Rift by the time I activated the Guardian, which is way more than double what I'd have expected to find playing on the Live realm. Hell, I'd be shocked to find 4-8 legs on Live playing on T6 with my best gear and some MF on, much less T1 with a newly-level 70.

After a few T1 Rifts I went up to T6, and the legs continued to flow in great numbers... but not that much more than I was getting on T1. I could probably be convinced that Bliz has really turned up the leg drops on lower difficulty levels, to help new players gear up and level up quickly... but that would probably be tinfoil hat territory.Continue reading the Original Blog Post.

I was playing on T10 doing regular rifts after the buff dropped off and was still having to leave Legendaries on the ground with a full inventory by the time I killed the Rift Guardian. I guess there will certainly be reasons to keep moving up in difficult after all.

Yeah, that's the odd thing - not only has there been no blue confirmation, but in fact Nevalistis specifically said she went asking to see if there was something up with the drop rate, but said she couldn't find anything bugged with it. http://us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/18300734573?page=2#21 There were more people reporting an increased drop rate in there as well (as did I), but of course the All Mighty and All Knowing Drothvader confidently asserted that "no, the drop rates haven't changed, you're just imagining it"

The drop rate is clearly up for legendaries but not for set items. I am just back from no Internet vacations and levelled a crusader so I play the below torment difficulty and found many legendaries, much above the one per hour scheme (which is less than that in normal difficulty on live). However, really a few set items dropped.

Looking at the requirements for Kanai cube, I read in these forums that 50 souls is cheap but I don't think Blizzard has the same opinion (because they think about casual players) and for them it is astronomically expensive if you consider the current live game. But with the PTR drop rate, I agree it is a reasonable price.

My idea is that they made what they spoke about (I do not remember at what occasion): normal < magical < rare < legendary < set, for both drop rate and power. This could be another sign of expansion: they will make all sets deprecated by adding new level 80 sets and we may have to grind a bit harder than current live game for them. It is not the case in the PTR now (I got a set item for Kadala so farming shards is still a possibility) but it may change. I think they could remove set items from Kadala, we have the cube recipe to help getting all elements.

You realise most set items are torment only, right? There isn't a separate chance to drop set items. Set items are just considered as legendaries in the drop table, so if there are fewer sets to drop, you'll see fewer of them. Otherwise below torment you'd just see loads of the same sets items again and again.